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By Paule Marshall
Paule Marshall (born April 9, 1929) is an American author. She was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn to Barbadian parents and educated at Girls High School, Brooklyn College (1953) and Hunter College (1955). Early in her career, she wrote poetry, but later returned to prose. She was chosen by Langston Hughes to accompany him on a world tour in which they both read their work, which was a boon to her career. Marshall has taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of California, Berkeley, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Yale University before holding the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture at New York University. In 1993 she received an honorary L.H.D. from Bates College. She lives in Richmond, Va. She is a MacArthur Fellow and is a past winner of the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. She was designated as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library in 1994. Marshall was inducted into the Celebrity Path at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in 2001.
Setting
The setting for Brown Girl, Brownstones is Brooklyn, New York, in the 1930s and 1940s. Selina's family, and many families like them, lease or own brownstone houses, having moved in after wealthy white people decided that the area was too rough. There are quiet areas, like the street where Selina lives, but the city is teeming with all different sorts of people engaging in all different sorts of activities.
New York's urban juxtaposition of the beautiful and the ugly can be seen in descriptions like, "But despite the ruin, spring stirred and, undaunted, arrayed the trees, hung its mist curtain high and, despite the wine-stench, sweetened the air" (Book 4, Selina, chap. 11, p. 309). This also indicates the spiritual setting of the book, in that despair and pain come to the characters, but they can still grow in such harsh circumstances.
Friends:
Florrie Trotman Iris Hurley Virgie Farnum The Challenors
Seon Braithwaite
Friends:
The concubine on Fulton Street
Silla
m.
Deighton
Selina Friends: Beryl Challenor Miss Thompson Suggie Skeete Miss Mary Clive Springer Rachel Fine
Relationships
Structural Devices
stream of consciousness interior monologue flashback foreshadowing chapter organization time frame motif juxtaposition.
Literary Devices
Motifs- e.g. War Symbols- e.g. The brownstones symbolize confinement, regimentation (to Selina), attainment of The American Dream (to Silla and other Bajan families), the land symbolizes a return to the homeland and traditions of Barbados Imagery- architectural-houses, rooms, the brownstones; seasonal Metaphors Allusions-literary, mythological, Biblical, musical Juxtaposition Irony Satire Humour
Themes
Racism Immigration/Making a new life Loyalty to self, family, community Loss Generational conflict between mothers and daughters/sons Coming of Age Relationships Dreams v/s Reality Identity/Individuality and how it is created/developed Belonging
Bibliography
http://biography.yourdictionary.com/paule-burke-marshall http://www.bookrags.com/studyguide-brown-girl-brownstones2/ http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Bildungsroman.html http://www.victorianweb.org/genre/hader1.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_Girl,_Brownstones http://postcolonialstudies.emory.edu/paule-marshall/ http://prezi.com/dcwmys8dcoop/brown-girl-brownstones/ http://www.slideshare.net/dylanangel/paule-marshall http://www.inflibnet.ac.in/ojs/index.php/JLCMS/article/viewFile/42/40